“Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard Phillips Feynman

  Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it took the whole afternoon to find a burned out resistor that was not apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I had time—there was nobody on my back saying, “What are you doing?” Instead, they were saying, “Would you like a little milk, or some cake?” I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can’t get off. If my mother’s friend had said, “Never mind, it’s too much work,” I’d have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn thing, as long as I’ve gone this far. I can’t just leave it after I’ve found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

  That’s a puzzle drive. It’s what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn’t stop until I figured the damn thing out—it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I’d do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.

  So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came over to me and said, “They say you’re a smart guy, so here’s one for you: A man has eight cords of wood to chop …”

  And I said, “He starts by chopping every other one in three parts,” because I had heard that one.

  Then she’d go away and come back with another one, and I’d always know it.

  This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance, she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and she said, “A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe …”

  “The daughter got the bubonic plague.”

  She collapsed! That was hardly enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the next day the mother goes to the daughter’s room and there’s nobody there, or somebody else is there, and she says, “Where’s my daughter?” and the hotel keeper says, “What daughter?” and the register’s got only the mother’s name, and so on, and so on, and there’s a big mystery as to what happened. The answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard it, so when the girl started out with, “A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe,” I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying guess, and got it.

  We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an envelope, and on the envelope it says “forty-five seconds.” She opens it up, writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, “Go!”—so you really have more than forty-five seconds because while she’s writing you can think. Now the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer. If the answer was “six books,” you’d have to write “6,” and put a big circle around it. If what was in the circle was right, you won; if it wasn’t, you lost.

  One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting “A is the number of red books, B is the number of blue books,” grind, grind, grind, until you get “six books.” That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So you had to think, “Is there a way to see it?” Sometimes you could see it in a flash, and sometimes you’d have to invent another way to do it and then do the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got better and better, and I eventually got to be the head of the team. So I learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to do the algebra—fast.

  Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical example was: There’s a flagpole, and there’s a rope that comes down from the top. When you hold the rope straight down, it’s three feet longer than the pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, it’s five feet from the base of the pole. How high is the pole?

  I developed some equations for solving problems like that, and as a result I noticed some connection—perhaps it was sin2 + cos2 = 1—that reminded me of trigonometry. Now, a few years earlier, perhaps when I was eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out from the library, but the book was by now long gone. I remembered only that trigonometry had something to do with relations between sines and cosines. So I began to work out all the relations by drawing triangles, and each one I proved by myself. I also calculated the sine, cosine, and tangent of every five degrees, starting with the sine of five degrees as given, by addition and half-angle formulas that I had worked out.

  A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had my notes and I saw that my demonstrations were often different from those in the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didn’t notice a simple way to do it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most clever—the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated! So sometimes I had ’em heat, and sometimes it was the other way around.

  While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn’t like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, “sin f” looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign.

  Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left-to-right reflected so that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma. That was the inverse sine, NOT sink f—that was crazy! They had that in books! To me, sini meant i/sine, the reciprocal. So my symbols were better.

  I didn’t like f(x)—that looked to me like f times x. I also didn’t like dy/dx—you have a tendency to cancel the d’s—so I made a different sign, something like an & sign. For logarithms it was a big L extended to the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.

  I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular symbols—it doesn’t make any difference what symbols you use—but I discovered later that it does make a difference. Once when I was explaining something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make these symbols, and he said, “What the hell are those?” I realized then that if I’m going to talk to anybody else, I’ll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.

  I had also invented a set of symbols for the typewriter, like FORTRAN has to do, so I could type equations. I also fixed typewriters, with paper clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didn’t break down like they do here in Los Angeles), but I wasn’t a professional repairman; I’d just fix them so they would work. But the whole problem of discovering what was the matter
, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it—that was interesting to me, like a puzzle.

  String Beans

  I must have been seventeen or eighteen when I worked one summer in a hotel run by my aunt. I don’t know how much I got—twenty-two dollars a month, I think—and I alternated eleven hours one day and thirteen the next as a desk clerk or as a busboy in the restaurant. And during the afternoon, when you were desk clerk, you had to bring milk up to Mrs. D—, an invalid woman who never gave us a tip. That’s the way the world was: You worked long hours and got nothing for it, every day.

  This was a resort hotel, by the beach, on the outskirts of New York City. The husbands would go to work in the city and leave the wives behind to play cards, so you would always have to get the bridge tables out. Then at night the guys would play poker, so you’d get the tables ready for them—clean out the ashtrays and so on. I was always up until late at night, like two o’clock, so it really was thirteen and eleven hours a day.

  There were certain things I didn’t like, such as tipping. I thought we should be paid more, and not have to have any tips. But when I proposed that to the boss, I got nothing but laughter. She told everybody, “Richard doesn’t want his tips, hee, hee, hee; he doesn’t want his tips, ha, ha, ha.” The world is full of this kind of dumb smart-alec who doesn’t understand anything.

  Anyway, at one stage there was a group of men who, when they’d come back from working in the city, would right away want ice for their drinks. Now the other guy working with me had really been a desk clerk. He was older than I was, and a lot more professional. One time he said to me, “Listen, we’re always bringing ice up to that guy Ungar and he never gives us a tip—not even ten cents. Next time, when they ask for ice, just don’t do a damn thing. Then they’ll call you back, and when they call you back, you say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot. We’re all forgetful sometimes.’ ”

  So I did it, and Ungar gave me fifteen cents! But now, when I think back on it, I realize that the other desk clerk, the professional, had really known what to do—tell the other guy to take the risk of getting into trouble. He put me to the job of training this fella to give tips. He never said anything; he made me do it!

  I had to clean up tables in the dining room as a busboy. You pile all this stuff from the tables on to a tray at the side, and when it gets high enough you carry it into the kitchen. So you get a new tray, right? You should do it in two steps—take the old tray away, and put in a new one—but I thought, “I’m going to do it in one step.” So I tried to slide the new tray under, and pull the old tray out at the same time, and it slipped—BANG! All the stuff went on the floor. And then, naturally, the question was, “What were you doing? How did it fall?” Well, how could I explain that I was trying to invent a new way to handle trays?

  Among the desserts there was some kind of coffee cake that came out very pretty on a doily, on a little plate. But if you would go in the back you’d see a man called the pantry man. His problem was to get the stuff ready for desserts. Now this man must have been a miner, or something—heavy built, with very stubby, rounded, thick fingers. He’d take this stack of doilies, which are manufactured by some sort of stamping process, all stuck together, and he’d take these stubby fingers and try to separate the doilies to put them on the plates. I always heard him say, “Damn deez doilies!” while he was doing this, and I remember thinking, “What a contrast—the person sitting at the table gets this nice cake on a doilied plate, while the pantry man back there with the stubby thumbs is saying, ‘Damn deez doilies!’ ” So that was the difference between the real world and what it looked like.

  My first day on the job the pantry lady explained that she usually made a ham sandwich, or something, for the guy who was on the late shift. I said that I liked desserts, so if there was a dessert left over from supper, I’d like that. The next night I was on the late shift till 2:00 A.M. with these guys playing poker. I was sitting around with nothing to do, getting bored, when suddenly I remembered there was a dessert to eat. I went over to the icebox and opened it up, and there she’d left six desserts! There was a chocolate pudding, a piece of cake, some peach slices, some rice pudding, some jello—there was everything! So I sat there and ate the six desserts—it was sensational!

  The next day she said to me, “I left a dessert for you.”

  “It was wonderful,” I said, “absolutely wonderful!”

  “But I left you six desserts because I didn’t know which one you liked the best.”

  So from that time on she left six desserts. They weren’t always different, but there were always six desserts.

  One time when I was desk clerk a girl left a book by the telephone at the desk while she went to eat dinner, so I looked at it. It was The Life of Leonardo, and I couldn’t resist: The girl let me borrow it and I read the whole thing.

  I slept in a little room in the back of the hotel, and there was some stew about turning out the lights when you leave your room, which I couldn’t ever remember to do. Inspired by the Leonardo book, I made this gadget which consisted of a system of strings and weights—Coke bottles full of water—that would operate when I’d open the door, lighting the pull-chain light inside. You open the door, and things would go, and light the light; then you close the door behind you, and the light would go out. But my real accomplishment came later.

  I used to cut vegetables in the kitchen. String beans had to be cut into one-inch pieces. The way you were supposed to do it was: You hold two beans in one hand, the knife in the other, and you press the knife against the beans and your thumb, almost cutting yourself. It was a slow process. So I put my mind to it, and I got a pretty good idea. I sat down at the wooden table outside the kitchen, put a bowl in my lap, and stuck a very sharp knife into the table at a forty-five-degree angle away from me. Then I put a pile of the string beans on each side, and I’d pick out a bean, one in each hand, and bring it towards me with enough speed that it would slice, and the pieces would slide into the bowl that was in my lap.

  So I’m slicing beans one after the other—chig, chig, chig, chig, chig—and everybody’s giving me the beans, and I’m going like sixty when the boss comes by and says, “What are you doing?”

  I say, “Look at the way I have of cutting beans!”—and just at that moment I put a finger through instead of a bean. Blood came out and went on the beans, and there was a big excitement: “Look at how many beans you spoiled! What a stupid way to do things!” and so on. So I was never able to make any improvement, which would have been easy—with a guard, or something—but no, there was no chance for improvement.

  I had another invention, which had a similar difficulty. We had to slice potatoes after they’d been cooked, for some kind of potato salad. They were sticky and wet, and difficult to handle. I thought of a whole lot of knives, parallel in a rack, coming down and slicing the whole thing. I thought about this a long time, and finally I got the idea of wires in a rack.

  So I went to the five-and-ten to buy some knives or wires, and saw exactly the gadget I wanted: it was for slicing eggs. The next time the potatoes came out I got my little egg-slicer out and sliced all the potatoes in no time, and sent them back to the chef. The chef was a German, a great big guy who was King of the Kitchen, and he came storming out, blood vessels sticking out of his neck, livid red. “What’s the matter with the potatoes?” he says. “They’re not sliced!”

  I had them sliced, but they were all stuck together. He says, “How can I separate them?”

  “Stick ’em in water,” I suggest.

  “IN WATER? EAGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!”

  Another time I had a really good idea. When I was desk clerk I had to answer the telephone. When a call came in, something buzzed, and a flap came down on the switchboard so you could tell which line it was. Sometimes, when I was helping the women with the bridge tables or sitting on the front porch in the middle of the afternoon (when there were very few calls), I’d be some distance from the switchboard when suddenly it would go. I’d co
me running to catch it, but the way the desk was made, in order to get to the switchboard you had to go quite a distance further down, then around, in behind, and then back up to see where the call was coming from—it took extra time.

  So I got a good idea. I tied threads to the flaps on the switchboard, and strung them over the top of the desk and then down, and at the end of each thread I tied a little piece of paper. Then I put the telephone talking piece up on top of the desk, so I could reach it from the front. Now, when a call came, I could tell which flap was down by which piece of paper was up, so I could answer the phone appropriately, from the front, to save time. Of course I still had to go around back to switch it in, but at least I was answering it. I’d say, “Just a moment,” and then go around to switch it in.

  I thought that was perfect, but the boss came by one day, and she wanted to answer the phone, and she couldn’t figure it out—too complicated. “What are all these papers doing? Why is the telephone on this side? Why don’t you … raaaaaaaa!”

  I tried to explain—it was my own aunt—that there was no reason not to do that, but you can’t say that to anybody who’s smart, who runsa hotel! I learned there that innovation is a very difficult thing in the real world.

  Who Stole the Door?

  At MIT the different fraternities all had “smokers” where they tried to get the new freshmen to be their pledges, and the summer before I went to MIT I was invited to a meeting in New York of Phi Beta Delta, a Jewish fraternity. In those days, if you were Jewish or brought up in a Jewish family, you didn’t have a chance in any other fraternity. Nobody else would look at you. I wasn’t particularly looking to be with other Jews, and the guys from the Phi Beta Delta fraternity didn’t care how Jewish I was—in fact, I didn’t believe anything about that stuff, and was certainly not in any way religious. Anyway, some guys from the fraternity asked me some questions and gave me a little bit of advice—that I ought to take the first-year calculus exam so I wouldn’t have to take the course—which turned out to be good advice. I liked the fellas who came down to New York from the fraternity, and the two guys who talked me into it, I later became their roommate.